Graham Duxbury explains why artists hold a key to effective communication on global issues.
Ever since what was then the ecology movement began to find its public voice in the mid 1970s, those working to protect and improve our natural environment have been grappling with two fundamental issues: how to convince people that things we cant see and that dont have an immediate impact on our lives are important, and how to motivate more people to take personal action on issues that require collective global solutions.
Setting the agenda
On the first, 30 years on from the pioneering work of organisations like Friends of the Earth and its founders like Richard Sandbrook, who sadly passed away in December, real progress has been made. Climate change is firmly at the top of the international and domestic political agenda and sustainable development the rallying cry of everyone from bishops to big business. Even the new Conservative party leader, David Cameron, made the promise to turn the Tories green one of his first acts in office.
Of course, many in the green movement continue to wring their hands that the language has been adopted without any real meaning or commitment. But others contend that, when such major shifts of language take place, action inevitably follows. Whether that action will be soon enough and significant enough of course remains to be seen.
Fear and guilt
On the second question, that of motivation, the jury is still out. The traditional approach to environmental campaigning has been built around two principles: fear and guilt. Over the years weve been drip-fed a set of highly charged messages aimed at scaring us into caring for the planet and its people. Large-scale extinctions, environmental disasters, sickness and disease, famine and the breakdown of civilisation itself have all been put forward as the nightmare scenarios. However, at the same time its been made clear that these horrors wont necessarily be visited on the current generation but will be challenges faced by our children and grandchildren. Hence the guilt are we really selfish enough in our wasteful, resource-guzzling consumerism to see our offspring gasping for clean air or drowning in toxic slime?
So, what can we do about it? Here lies the third, equally problematic, plank of the traditional communications conundrum. Thats because the answer is seldom in the positive. We have to do less of things, deprive ourselves, moderate our lifestyles in short, suffer the pain so that our descendants gain. In an age when everything around us is made of plastic and when world markets would collapse without oil, doing your bit seems a little like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Until now.
Creative communications
Although it may not have registered on many peoples radars, activity currently being sponsored by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is helping us turn a very significant corner thanks to a simple and creative process. A short film produced to support a new stream of government funding makes the gases we produce from our homes, cars and businesses visible in the atmosphere. An accompanying animation sequence illustrates the cause-and-effect relationship that connects a light switch in our house to the melting of the polar ice caps. Both are accessible, powerful and effective means of bridging the gap between personal action and global consequence.
The work was commissioned to support the launch of the Governments Climate Change Communications initiative, a 3-year campaign backed by a pot of money that will soon start to be distributed as grants. There is a significant opportunity for the creative community to drive this campaign, and indeed benefit from this funding. The power of the arts rests in their ability to help people achieve a different perspective on the world, to see things that are invisible and to acquire knowledge through the senses. For too long messages about climate change and other environmental issues have been developed and delivered either by the scientific community or the green movement. They have provided the information and the passion, but what they have often lacked is the ability to connect and engage with a wider audience. This is where artists have the potential to make a huge contribution.
Changing behaviour
DEFRAs campaign is built around a new understanding of how to encourage behaviour change. Behind the jargon about social transmitters and cognitive dissonance is a fundamental rethinking of how to engage and motivate people to act differently. It has at last been recognised that scaring people doesnt work and that people need positive associations and practical outlets for understanding to lead to action. Underway at the same time is an exercise aimed at connecting climate change communications to community development processes. Under the banner of Community Action 2020, organisations as diverse as housing associations and the Womens Institute are being encouraged to incorporate action on sustainable development into the work they do to improve skills, provide support and engage communities in consultation about regeneration and local services.
This, again, requires creative community-based processes that are now the stock-in-trade of many arts professionals. Whether finding engaging ways of helping people explore their neighbourhood and understand their heritage, or whether working to create temporary or permanent markers of peoples thoughts, feelings and concerns, artists are now firmly embedded in the community development process. What a major step forward it would be if this connection could also be used to help people explore, and address the global as well as the local.
Graham Duxbury is Head of Communications for Groundwork UK.
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w: {www.groundwork.org.uk}
Art and artists are increasingly playing their part in raising awareness of environmental issues. A new exhibition at the Natural History Museum, The Ship: The Art of Climate Change, which will run from June to September, will examine the impact of climate change. The exhibition will look at the work of many international artists who have travelled to the Arctic under the auspices of Cape Farewell, an initiative which enables artists to experience first hand the effects of global warming. Among those who have translated these experiences into work which will be featured in the exhibition are Siobhan Davies, Antony Gormley, Ian McEwan and Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey (whose Ice Lens 2005 is pictured). Bergit Arends, Art Curator at the Natural History Museum commented, We are trying to use the personal experiences of renowned artists, and the creative vocabulary of art rather than science, to raise an awareness that everyone individually can help alleviate the impacts of climate change.